Starting Your Internet Business Right

I grew up in Western New York. I know that
most people who've never been to New York think that it's one big city. Trust
me; there's a lot more woods than there is city. There are millions of acres of
wilderness in New York State.

We used to spend 10 days every summer camping off a series of old
logging trails in the Adirondack Mountains. If you wander off the beaten path,
you had better have a compass, a canteen and some food. Every couple of years,
someone wanders into those deep woods and never comes back.

Sounds kind of like the Internet, doesn’t
it? It's a thing so vast and complicated that it's hard to wrap your mind
around it. The easiest thing to do is just give it a cool-sounding name, and
hope you never have to try to explain it to anyone!

Well, I used to be one of those
systems-engineer guys who actually understands much of what goes on there. I
wouldn't recommend systems engineering to the squeamish. The courses you have
to take can give you the strangest nightmares! It's a lonely profession, too. I
can't talk to my friends about what I used to do; it just makes their eyes
glaze over.

Anyway, I'm going to talk about some of
the basics of how the Internet works. I'm not going to prattle to you about
Class-C IP Addressing, Virtual Webs, or redirecting an MX record on a DNS
Server. That's one of those things that systems guys do to impress other people
at staff meetings. I'd just be listening to myself talk, and you wouldn't gain
anything useful.

The best way I can think of to visualize the Internet in basic
terms, is to think about it as a worldwide telephone network.

There's a huge network of wiring that connects all the telephones
in the world, in one way or another. That network is broken up into many parts,
and owned by many different companies. If you live in Orlando, you make your
phone calls through the telephone wires installed and maintained by Sprint, for
example. If you live somewhere else, AT&T might maintain your phone line.
If you live on the Island of Wheredaheckawee, your island might have many phone
lines, but they are all connected to the outside world through a single
underwater phone cable from the Mainland. However it interconnects, it's all
part of the same giant network.

All that wiring throughout the world has
one simple purpose. It connects to your phone, so you can make phone calls. At
your home, you probably have a single phone line. Without getting into the
pricey add-ons like call waiting, etc., the purpose of your phone line is
simple. You can make or take one phone call at a time. You can call one person,
or one person can call you.

A big company headquarters, like Kodak,
for example, might have thousands of phone lines connected to a big
switchboard, so that their company can make or take thousands of calls at the
same time. Kodak also has those fancy phones that can connect to several lines
at once, or call many people on different phone lines, and connect to them all
at the same time. A conference call, for example.

Pretty simple, right?

Now, let's relate that to the Internet.
The Internet is just another big 'phone network', only instead of being
connected to phones, the lines are connected to computers.

Those computers fall into two basic categories: Workstations, and
Servers.

The computer in your home is a Workstation. When you're connected
to the Internet, you use your Workstation to make 'phone calls' to other
computers. Instead of paying telephone service charges to the phone company for
a phone call, you pay 'Internet Access fees' to your Internet provider (such as
ATT, NetZero, etc.), to connect your Workstation to other computers.

There are places out there with computers
that are like the big fancy switchboard that Kodak uses. They reside in
buildings with thousands of 'phone lines' connected to them. These computers
can connect with many other computers at the same time, and handle the computer
equivalent of 'conference calls.' They are called Servers.

Servers can connect to many Workstations at once. Thousands of
people who connect to AOL, for example, can be connected to the same Server at
the same time. When that Server reaches it's 'maximum load' (like a switchboard
that can only connect a certain number of calls at once), another Server will
take the overflow, and so on.

Every Server on the Internet is connected to all the other Servers
as well.

Basically, the Internet is one big
gigantic computer conference call, with people joining in and dropping out all the time. The
Workstations (your computer) are the participants, and the Servers are the
Company management team, moderating the discussion.

Ok, so what about all that information
that you can look up on the Internet all the time? You can go to a Search
Engine and find the current price of wheat in Russia, or get a list of
suggested names for your new puppy. Where does it all come from?

Web Sites. Everything you ever wanted to
know, and many things you never wanted to know can be found on the millions of
Web Sites around the world. Where do the Web Sites actually reside? Where do
those actual bits of information live?

On Servers.

When you create a Web Site, you are actually renting a small
amount of computer hard drive space on a Server somewhere. Whether you use that
hard drive space for a Web Site that lists all of your Aunt Matilda's favorite
recipes, or you use it to set up an Internet Store, it's all the same thing.
Just a sliver of rented space on some Server computer's hard drives. The money
you pay for that space is paid to whatever company owns that particular Server,
and has connected it to the giant conference call that is the Internet.

Now, how do the Search Engines find your
Web Site, which could be sitting on a flashing and beeping Server rack the size
of a phone booth, anywhere in the world?

Let's go back to the conference call.
Remember when I said that all the Servers on the Internet are connected to all
the other Servers? Remember that each Web Site sits on the hard drive of some
Server, somewhere? Well, the Search Engines are the same way. A Search Engine
is just a computer program sitting on some Server, somewhere.

A Search Engine program is constantly
talking with all the Servers on the Internet, asking those other Servers what
kinds of goodies they have stashed in the Web Sites that have been created on
their hard drives. The Search Engine gathers all that information and keeps a
record of it.

When you go to the Google Search Engine, for example, and type in
a search for 'Ankle Bracelets', the Google Search Engine program looks in its
records. It finds all the references it discovered concerning Ankle Bracelets
on all the Servers around the world, and returns a list of those records to
you. These are called "Links". When you click on one of them, your
Workstation connects to the Server that contains that information. The
information opens on your computer screen in the form of a Web Page.

Hopefully, though, this will provide a basic understanding of what
the Internet really is: one giant never-ending computer conference call!